School For Profit. K12 Inc., K12.com

2011-09-05: Education Report

2/17/15 Growth of charter schools in Pennsylvania by Daniel Simmons-Ritchie. The charter lobby has spent millions to influence legislators. It also has the ability to mobilize hundreds of children to pack legislators’ offices, a tactic unavailable to public schools. Pennsylvania does not allow for-profit charter schools, yet there are many for-profit charter schools in the state. It’s no secret that Harrisburg is a hive of lobbyists, each representing industries and interests that spend millions to persuade state lawmakers to bend laws in their favor. But perhaps what makes the charter-school lobby unique among the pack, says State Rep. Bernie O’Neill, a Republican from Bucks County, is its ability to deploy children to its cause. In 2014, O’Neill experienced that first hand after proposing changes to a funding formula that would affect charter schools. Parents and children stormed his office and barraged him with calls and emails. "They were calling me the anti-Christ of everything," O’Neill said. "Everybody was coming after me." In recent years, as charter schools have proliferated – particularly those run by for-profit management companies – so too has their influence on legislators. In few other places has that been more true than Pennsylvania, which is one of only 11 states that has no limits on campaign contributions from PACs or individuals. Charter school advocates have donated more than $10 million to Pennsylvania politicians over the past nine years. The Pennsylvania State Education Association, which represents 170,000 teachers and related professionals, has spent about $8.3 million over the same time period according to Follow The Money. But what perhaps makes the influx of money from charter-school groups unique in Pennsylvania is the magnitude of spending by only a handful of donors and, in recent years, some of their high-profile successes in moving and blocking legislation. "They are mobilized," O’Neill said. "It’s a plan reviled by teachers, loathed by parents, and decried by local politicians, but against huge opposition, York may become the third city in America to privatize the entirety of one of its public school districts." How did a public school system in the midstate rise to the forefront of a national experiment in education reform? And how did an entire community lose control of its own decision-making ability? The answer to both those questions, education researchers and public watchdogs say, lies in large part on a concerted, multi-million dollar campaign over the past decade by for-profit schools to alter Pennsylvania law. "Those changes, and the industry lobbying that continues behind-the-scenes, have implications for teachers and students across the entire state. It’s a subject we have tackled in a series entitled "The Rise of Charter Schools in Pa."

2/19/15 An Ontario regulator has shut down U.S.-based Everest College, a chain of 14 private career schools. The school is owned by U.S.-based Corinthian Colleges Inc., which was a Nasdaq-listed public company until it was delisted this month for failing to file financial information with regulators in a timely manner. That came after allegations of falsified job placement and grade data last year led Corinthian to agree to shut down and sell numerous locations as part of a deal with U.S. lawmakers.

5/31/14 Business School, Disrupted NYT
Universities across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being left behind. “Harvard is going to make a lot of money,” Mr. Ulrich predicted. “They will sell a lot of seats at those courses. But those seats are very carefully designed to be off to the side. It’s designed to be not at all threatening to what they’re doing at the core of the business school.” Professor Porter said. “I think the big risk in any new technology is to believe the technology is the strategy. Just because 200,000 people sign up doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” “We’re at the very high end of the market, and disruption always hits the high end last,” said Professor Christensen, who recently predicted that half of the United States’ universities could face bankruptcy within 15 years. Who will win the coming business school shakeout? Professor Porter acknowledged that it’s a multidimensional question.

IVY LEAGUE
FOR PROFIT

Ivy League a for-profit university launch
Apr 4th 2012
"THE first elite university to be launched in America in over a century.” Ben Nelson, who cut his entrepreneurial teeth as chief executive of Snapfish, a photo website, does not shy away from making big claims. But he has every reason to boast. On April 3rd Benchmark Capital announced that it will fund Minerva, which plans to welcome its first class of students in September 2014, to the tune of $25m—one of the biggest seed investments of a leading Silicon Valley venture firm ever. What is more, the new university’s advisory board will be chaired by Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard University, and count among its members Bob Kerrey, a former senator and head of the New School in New York, and Pat Harker, president of the University of Delaware and a former dean of the Wharton School."
Currently, America’s 30 or so elite universities turn away over 90% of applicants (the vast majority of whom meet the qualification standards) as the result of a process he describes as a “lottery”. In particular, Minerva is aiming to tap into the demand for an elite American education from the developing world’s rising middle class—for the “children of a Wipro middle manager from India, or a Foxconn line operator from China,” in the words of Mr Nelson.

East China Normal University, the Chinese partners with New York University Shanghai, the first Sino-US joint higher education institute, will have a high requirement for language skills, as English will be the language of instruction. Non-native English speakers will need to provide an English language proficiency certificate either IELTS, TOFEL or Chinese College Entrance Exam's English test score.
NYU Shanghai's campus will be built in downtown Lujiazui area in 2014. Jeffrey Lehman, previous president of Cornell University and the founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law, will be the university's vice chancellor. The future students will be able to spend one to three semesters at NYU's 10-plus campuses or overseas study centers in New York, Abu Dhabi and other countries, the university announced yesterday. Chinese mainland students will account for 51 percent while international students will account for 49 percent. The mainland students have to take the national college entrance exam, which will be a major reference for the university to choose students. International students will be recruited through the admissions system of NYU.It plans to set up seven majors including physical science, mathematics and engineering.

We don't have competition for police and fire services, which are required to be uniformly excellent and equitable. When they're not, they're improved directly, not by siphoning funds for alternatives. Departments of education in every state should uphold every child's right to a free, appropriate public education, he says. Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care, and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.

K12 Inc., A private FOR PROFIT online education company provides virtual education to children in 28 states had a net income of $21.5 million IN 2010.

NO REGULATION LOOPHOLE

(K12 inc. PARTNERS) with Carroll County (WHICH IS POOR) as its public-school intermediary to provide virtual education through eighth grade for students across the state, and MAKES AS MUCH AS $3,700 per pupil in STATE AID.The state provides $5,612 for each student in Carroll County – including those in the virtual academy. These children in the virtual academy are considered Carroll County students. The students enrolled in K12 log in from their homes across the state. They never have to step into a Carroll County school. Their parents rarely speak to Carroll County teachers. Most of the contact is with K12's certified teachers, who work from their homes. The state spends more on some of them than it would if they attended brick -and-mortar schools in their hometowns.

10/20/10 This The first time the religious group has entered the charter school industry. ~ Rev. Reginald Jackson executive director of the Black Ministers Council.
Two virtual schools, a Hebrew language high school and five schools proposed by New Jersey's Black Ministers Council are among 50 charter school applications under consideration by the state Department of Education. The Rev. Reginald Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council said his organization has applied for five charters — one in East Orange, one in Linden and three in South Jersey — that would feature longer school days and additional instruction in "character development." http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/10/nj_charter_applications_await.html

Fcat owned by the Bush family Jeb Bush, Neil Bush who make money from K-12 Testing.

Sandy Kress, the architect of Bush's old high-stakes testing model in Texas and the overhaul of ESEA in 2001. Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB. Sandy Kress White House senior education advisor's turn from public servant to corporate lobbyist, having crafted George W. Bush's signature education plan's "No Child Left Behind" which was a rewrite of Lyndon Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Education Act and was all about making a profit.
Corporations specializing in standardized testing and in "supplemental education services," the same ones now lining up to expand their profit margins during the next six years, as NCLB is being re-authorized by this Congress.
While Bush's longtime friends like Sandy Kress and Harold McGraw have made a killing from the implementation of Bush-Kress's "No Child Left Behind," they're not the only ones, by a long shot. The story of NCLB's most amazing success story didn't begin in any school building, anywhere in America; it began with the failure of the Silverado Savings and Loan of Denver, Colorado, in 1988.

WHY IS THIS? Can it be Racism, Cultural Confusion and Ignorance? Can it be a Culture of Corruption in Education and Politics?

A Parent's Guide to Choosing the Right Online Program K-12 online learning is growing at 30% annually. Thirty-four states have state-led virtual school programs, eighteen states offer full-time online learning programs, while 70% of school districts offer at least one online course to students.

National Standards for Quality Online Programs.
This publication is designed to provide states, districts, online programs, accreditation agencies and other organizations with a set of over-arching quality guidelines for online programs in several categories: leadership, instruction, content, support services and evaluation.

National Standards of Quality for Online Courses
The standards selected are based on the results of a research review and survey of online course quality criteria. These quality standards were evaluated and assembled into an easy to use document for evaluating online courses with common benchmarks.

Accreditation is a non-governmental activity based on peer-review that serves the dual functions of assuring quality and motivating improvement.Marion Brady

Explore K-12 State and National Curriculum Teaching Standards history of failed reform.
Whatever the reason for the congressional mandate requiring the 50 states to test, those tests are now the tail wagging the education dog. And they're all but useless. Their fans refuse to admit it – refuse even to debate the matter – but the incontrovertible fact is that the only thing standardized, machine-scored tests can measure with precision is a kid's short-term memory. That particular thought process has some obvious uses, but none that would justify either the billions of dollars being funneled to the testing industry to measure it, or the time that teachers and learners are wasting getting ready to be measured.
What's true for the FCAT will be equally true for end-of-course exams. An education is supposed to help kids learn to think better, and learner ability to think, really THINK, can't be measured by standardized, machine-scored exams. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. No computer-graded test can determine the relative merit of a kid's inferences, hypotheses, generalizations, value judgments, or any other important, real-world thought process. Second-guessing what was in the head of whoever wrote a particular multiple-choice question isn't higher-order thinking.
If Florida joins 17 other states and switches from a single test to end-of-course exams for every subject, the only beneficiaries will be the testing companies. Their executives, anticipating big boosts in bonuses, think the switch is a great idea. “But!” the reader protests, “without the FCAT or end-of-course tests, how can kids, teachers and schools be held accountable?”
We're big into international comparisons, so we should learn from them. Currently, Finland is at the top of the international academic-performance heap. A few years ago, that wasn't true. How did they do it? They used a pretty simple strategy. They hire teachers from the cream of the academic crop, train them well, and leave them alone.

Revolutionary!

Marion Brady is a retired high school teacher, college professor and district-level administrator, and the author of textbooks, professional books, and journal articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post newspaper as a guest blogger. His website is www.MarionBrady.com.

Tweedledee to Tweedledum: From FCAT to End-of-Course Exams By Marion Brady
Maybe it's because just about everybody older than 5 has been to school. Whatever the explanation, most people have an education-reform theory, and many aren't reluctant to share them. Controversies about educating probably generate more letters to editors, more friction at school board meetings, more editorializing, and more pontificating by politicians and syndicated columnists, than any other single issue.
Interestingly, most of those myriad theories are valid. Given the size, complexity and diversity of school systems and the populations they serve, it's possible to find evidence to support almost any reform proposal.
Yes, the “turnaround” approach used in Chicago by Arne Duncan, the new U.S. secretary of education – shutting down whole schools, or firing and replacing all the teachers and administrators – sometimes works. But it also often leaves an underlying nonschool problem unaddressed, or even makes a bad situation worse by seriously destabilizing a community.
Yes, replacing history, civics, art and other classes with hours of intensive reading drills may improve scores on reading tests. But if, as many teachers have discovered, those nonstop reading drills make kids hate reading, a battle has been won and a war lost.
Yes, lengthening the school day and year increases instructional time. But if that time is spent doing more of whatever brought the school to crisis, or if it screws up families by reducing employment opportunities for kids who are contributing to a marginal family income or caring for younger siblings, the lengthened school schedule can trigger a different set of problems.Choose a Reform Strategy — Any Strategy Choose any random education reform strategy. Sometimes it will work. Sometimes it won't. Sometimes it will make a bad situation worse.
Everybody has a theory, but the ones that count are those in the heads of legislators, few of whom know much about educating.
An editorial in the Feb. 15 Orlando Sentinel reflects the current thinking on school improvement by Florida legislators:
“If a bill backed by a bipartisan group of state legislators gains steam, high-schoolers soon could say goodbye to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. But they'd also say hello to new mathematics and science tests that they'd need to pass certain classes and earn course credit.”
The problem with most reform proposals is that they address effects rather than causes, symptoms rather than underlying problems. That's what's wrong with this particular proposal.What was the problem the FCAT was originally put in place to address? The least-charitable answer is that it was a back-door strategy to privatize public education. By setting in motion a process that required “annual yearly progress,” the math says that by 2014 the “failing” label could be hung on just about every school in Florida and the rest of America. That would “prove” that public schools couldn't educate, and the general public would then be willing to hand them over to corporations (a process already well under way).
The most charitable explanation for adopting the FCAT is that it was a sincere effort to find out how well learners were learning, enabling educators to decide what to do next.

We live in an era when leaders in business and the media demand that schools function like businesses in a free market economy, competing for students and staff. Many such voices say that such corporate-style school reform is stymied by the teacher unions, which stand in the way of leaders who want unchecked power to assign, reward, punish, or remove their employees. Some academics blame the unions when student achievement remains stagnant. If scores are low, the critics say it must be because of the teachers' contract, not because the district has a weak curriculum or lacks resources or has mediocre leadership. If some teachers are incompetent, it must be because of the contract, not because the district has a flawed, bureaucratic hiring process or has failed to evaluate new teachers before awarding them tenure. These critics want to scrap the contract, throw away teachers' legal protections, and bring teacher unions to their collective knees.
It is worth recalling why teachers joined unions and why unions remain important today. Take tenure, for example. The teacher unions didn't invent tenure, despite widespread beliefs to the contrary. Tenure evolved in the 19th century as one of the few perks available to people who were paid low wages, had classes of 70 or 80 or more, and endured terrible working conditions. In late 19th century New York City, for example, there were no teacher unions, but there was already ironclad, de facto teacher tenure. Local school boards controlled the hiring of teachers, and the only way to get a job was to know someone on the local school board, preferably a relative. Once a teacher was hired, she had lifetime tenure in that school, but only in that school. In fact, she could teach in the same school until she retired--without a pension or health benefits--or died.
One problem with this kind of tenure was that it was not portable. If a teacher changed schools, even in the same district, she would lose her tenure in the school where she was first hired, and she would have to go to the end of the line at her new school.
Pay for teaching was meager, but it was one of the few professional jobs open to women, and most teachers were women. Pay scales were blatantly discriminatory. Teachers in the high schools were paid more than those in the elementary schools. Male teachers (regardless of where they taught, though almost all were in high schools) were paid more than female teachers, on the assumption that they had a family to support and women did not.
I would like to remember some of the forgotten heroes of the movement to establish fair and equitable treatment of teachers in New York City.
First, there was Mary Murphy. She started teaching in the Brooklyn schools in 1891. Ten years later, in 1901, she got married. That was a mistake. When she got married, the Board of Education charged her with gross misconduct and fired her. Teachers were not allowed to marry. She sued the Board. She lost in the lower court, but then won in the state court of appeals, which ruled that marriage "was not misconduct" and ordered the Board of Education to reinstate her.
Second, there was the Interborough Association of Women Teachers. They started a campaign in 1906 to wipe out the salary differentials between male and female teachers. Their slogan was "equal pay for equal work." When the state legislature passed the Association's bill for equal pay, it was vetoed by the governor. These stalwart female teachers finally won pay equity in 1912.
Then there was Bridget Pexitto, a veteran teacher of 18 years in the Bronx. She took advantage of the new right to get married without losing her job. But then she got pregnant. That was a mistake. The Board of Education fired her on charges of "gross negligence by being absent to have a baby." Not only that, the Board ordered the superintendent of schools to discover whether there were any other pregnant teachers in the city's schools. He somehow did a visual inspection of the city's teachers and found 14 of them, and they were promptly suspended from teaching. Bridget Pexitto fought the decision in state court and was eventually reinstated with back pay by the state commissioner of education.
The forerunner to the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was the New York City Teachers' Union, which was founded in 1916. It was known as Local 2 of the American Federation of Teachers. Its purposes were to fight for improved salaries, to fight against "oppressive supervision," and to defend the rights of teachers like Mary Murphy and Bridget Pexitto.
* * *

Today, the UFT and other teacher unions around the country continue to play important roles in protecting the rights of teachers, especially in the current climate of school reform. There's a common view among corporate-style reformers today that the way to fix low-performing schools is to install an autocratic principal who rules with an iron fist. Many new principals have been trained in quickie programs of a year or less, which try to teach them to think like corporate leaders. Many of the graduates of these new principal programs have little classroom experience, and some have none at all. Many of them lack the judgment and knowledge to make wise decisions about curriculum and instruction or to evaluate seasoned teachers.
When experienced teachers must work under the control of an inexperienced principal, they need the protection of their union against arbitrary and unwise decisions.
Furthermore, to the extent that New York City, where I live, is the wave of the future, then teachers will need their unions more than ever. In New York City, under mayoral control, the mayor--a businessman--and his chancellor--a lawyer--selected a new curriculum in reading and math. They also insisted that all teachers across this system of 1.1 million children adopt exactly the same pedagogical style (the "workshop model"), and they micromanaged teachers' compliance with tight, sometimes daily supervision.
Teachers found that they were in trouble if they did not teach exactly as the mayor and chancellor dictated, if they did not follow the scripted cookie-cutter format of mini-lessons, if their bulletin boards did not meet detailed specifications, or if their classroom furniture was not precisely as prescribed by regulation. In these past few years, I have often been confronted by teachers who asked what they could do when their supervisors and coaches insisted that they teach in ways they (the teachers) believed were wrong. I could only answer that they should be glad they belonged to a union with the power to protect them from "oppressive supervision," to use the term that was familiar to the founders of Local 2 of the AFT.
As it happened, in the contract negotiations of 2005, the UFT successfully added language to the contract that specifically protected teachers from being punished because of: "a) the format of bulletin boards; b) the arrangement of classroom furniture; and c) the exact duration of lesson units."
The union is thus necessary as a protection for teachers against the arbitrary exercise of power by heavy-handed administrators. In our school systems, as in our city, state, and federal governments, we need checks and balances. Just as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government all act as checks on each other, we need checks and balances in our school systems. It is unwise to centralize all power in one person: the mayor. We need independent lay school boards to hire the superintendent and to hold open public discussions of administrative decisions, and we need independent teacher unions to assure that teachers' rights are protected, to sound the alarm against unwise policies, and to advocate on behalf of sound education policies, especially when administrators are non-educators.
In the current climate, when it is in vogue to select non-educators to administer school systems, it is vital that teachers have a voice. School reform cannot possibly succeed when teachers--who are on the frontlines of implementation--are left out of the decision-making process. If there is no "buy-in," if teachers do not willingly concur with the orders handed down from on high, then reform cannot succeed. If administrators operate by stealth and confrontation, then their plans for reform will founder. They cannot improve what happens in the classroom by humiliating and bossing around the teachers who are in daily contact with the children. Only in an atmosphere of mutual respect can administrators and teachers produce the kind of partnership that will benefit students. And administrators cannot achieve this collaborative atmosphere unless they are willing to talk with and listen to the leaders chosen by teachers to represent them.
The essentials of good education are the same everywhere: a rigorous curriculum, effective instruction, adequate resources, willing students, and a social and cultural climate in which education is encouraged and respected. Teacher unions today, as in the past, must work to make these essentials available in every district for every school and every student. They cannot do it alone. They must work with administrators and elected officials to advance these goals. The unions will continue to be important, vital, and needed so long as they speak on behalf of the rights and dignity of teachers and the essentials of good education.Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Brookings Institution. She was Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush. Her latest book is The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know, which she edited with her son Michael, Oxford University Press.

2011-09-05: Education Report

September 7, 2011 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published Education Report offering a timely review of the sector. This Special Report contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs, Equity Analysts and Money Managers. Please find an excerpt below.

4 leading Analysts; and top management from 5 Sector Firms examine this vital industry in this 36 page report from The Wall Street Transcript. Order this Report